Early Decision of Prediction Direction with Hierarchical Correlation for HEVC Compression

Abstract

The emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard attempts to improve the coding efficiency by a factor of two over H.264/AVC through the use of new compression tools with high computational complexity. Although multipledirectional prediction is one of the features contributing to the improved compression efficiency, the computational complexity for prediction increases significantly. This paper presents an early uni-directional prediction decision algorithm. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the property of HEVC that it supports a deep quad-tree block structure. Statistical observation shows that the correlation of prediction direction among different blocks which share same area is very high. Based on this observation, the mode of the current block is determined early according to the mode of upper blocks. Bi-directional prediction is not performed when the upper block is encoded as the uni-directional prediction mode. A simulation shows that it reduces ME operation time by about 22.7% with a marginal drop in compression efficiency.